Quotesdtb.com
Home
Authors
Quotes of the day
Top quotes
Topics
Italo Svevo quotes
The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno.
Italo Svevo
It is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.
Italo Svevo
You might with advantage take out your map of modern literature and mark on it the name of Italo Svevo...for Svevo and his novel, Confessions of Zeno...will henceforth be on other people's maps, and it is well that the atlases of the enlightened should agree.
Italo Svevo
He was more than willing to instruct me, and in my notebook he actually wrote in his own hand the three commandments he considered sufficient to make any firm prosper: 1. There's no need for a man to know how to work, but if he doesn't know how to make others work, he is doomed. (2) There is only one great regret: not having acted in one's own best interest. (3) In business, theory is useful, but it can be utilized only after the deal has been made.
Italo Svevo
You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.
Italo Svevo
Misunderstanding women is a clear sign of scant virility.
Italo Svevo
When a man dies, he has too many other worries to allow any thinking about death.
Italo Svevo
Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten.
Italo Svevo
Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain...in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space?
Italo Svevo
Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie.
Italo Svevo
Zeno is one of the comic masterpieces of the century; as Svevo had previously used Flaubert more intelligently than any Italian before him, here he uses Freud in a way that no Italian has done since.
Italo Svevo
Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction.
Italo Svevo
In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I.
Italo Svevo
A preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propogandize murder only through wickedness.
Italo Svevo
Life is neither ugly nor beautiful, but it's original!
Italo Svevo